Picking Up the Pieces

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“Report,” I snapped, as I heard the sound of mortars adding to the general chaos. “Status report, right bloody now!”

“Enemy forces are engaging the gate guard with automatic weapons and mortar fire,” TechnoMage said, looking at his console. Red lights were blinking into existence as more attacks were reported. I took one look and swore. Apart from Fort Galloway, all of our smaller garrisons and patrols were coming under attack. “Counter-battery laser fire is taking down the incoming rounds so far, but it’s only a matter of time before one gets through and wrecks havoc.”

I keyed my earpiece. “Status Red,” I ordered, quickly. It was an alert status that had to be declared, never assumed. An incoming handful of mortar rounds was no particular danger, but the sheer scale of the assault meant that a major attack was under way. If Fort Galloway was under attack as well as the spaceport — and all of the other garrisons — it suggested that the enemy was intent on knocking out both the Legion and the Svergie Army. Against the UNPF, their tactics might well have succeeded — the UNPF was known to be careful about keeping watch, or allowing soldiers to carry loaded weapons while off-duty — but against us? We’d find out very soon. “Get all the shuttles and aircraft to hangers; prep the helicopters for flight.”

“Sir,” someone objected, “they’ll have SAM missiles near the spaceport.”

“I know,” I snapped back. It was much easier to shoot down a heavily-laden helicopter leaving the spaceport than one that was in the air and ready to launch countermeasures upon demand. The enemy was probably hoping that we’d follow the UN pattern and launch the helicopters as soon as the attack began. “Hold them back until I command them to launch.”

A moment passed as more reports came in; a handful of light attacks in New Copenhagen and the other three cities. They didn’t seem to be anything like as bad as the Communist attacks, mainly designed to force us to keep our heads down until it was too late. The Communists had shown a astonishing lack of concern for civilian casualties, but the farmers and miners were more restrained. They might even have a sense of proper governance, unlike their Communist counterparts. I hoped briefly that Frida was alive and safe — we’d designed precautions to keep both the President and the Acting President safe in the event of another attack — but if we lost the coming battle, it wouldn’t matter. The enemy were clearly going for all the marbles. They were throwing away assets that could have been preserved, such as agents in the capital, and the only reason they would do that was if they expected the battle to be decisive.

“I’m going to the command centre,” I said, finally. “Peter can escort me there. Tech, keep looking for the location of the enemy command unit and call in fire if you locate it.”

“It’s hard to localise the sources of those encrypted transmissions,” TechnoMage said, grimly. “I suspect that the sources are actually moving.”

I nodded. With the William Tell on the other side of the planet — the attack had evidently been carefully timed — it would be much harder to trace the source of the signals, or even gain an overall impression of what the enemy were doing. The UAVs were doing what they could, but I was leery about using them; if one could be shot down, the others could be knocked down as well. I smiled to myself; one way or another, it probably didn’t matter. If we lost the coming battle, the enemy would probably try us as enemies of the people and sentence us to death.

“Swing two of the UAVs towards the north,” I ordered, finally. “I need real-time data on what the enemy is doing.”

“Yes, sir,” TechnoMage said. If he had any doubts about what I had ordered, he kept them to himself. “I’ll inform the pilots at once.”

The sound of shooting and explosions grew louder the second Peter and I stepped outside, keeping low in case of enemy snipers. The enemy infantrymen were attacking the main gate on the road leading to New Copenhagen, using automatic weapons and RPGs to make an impression on the defenders, but it looked as if the defenders were holding them at bay. We’d sealed the area, cleared fields of fire and laid down minefields and other nasty traps for anyone intent on hurting our main base. The infantrymen, lacking heavy support, wouldn’t be able to break in until we ran out of ammunition and that would be a long time in coming.

Peter insisted on going first, pistol in hand, as we moved towards the command centre. The spaceport was still a hive of activity, with men and women struggling to get the aircraft into the hardened shelters before the enemy got lucky with a mortar round, but everyone gave us a wide berth, except Russell. He ran over, weapon in hand, and was damn lucky not to be shot by accident. Peter’s acidic comment left no doubt of that.

“I’ve sent the cadets into the bunkers, apart from the most advanced class, which I’ve armed and placed on reserve duty,” Russell reported, as we stumbled together into the command centre. The roar of a Landshark moving to engage anyone who broke through the main gate deafened us for a long moment. “If the enemy breaks through, we can use them as back-up for the reserves. I hate to place them at risk like that, but if the enemy break in…”

“Good thinking,” I said. None of Russell’s charges would have believed it, but their Drill Sergeant cared intensely about each and every one of them, even the ones he chewed out on a regular basis. A Drill Sergeant had to be very cruel to be kind, most of the time, and none of them would have disputed that Russell was cruel, but he cared. Using cadets as infantrymen went against the grain. “Are the ones in the bunker armed?”

“Yes, sir,” Russell said, taking full responsibility for what could have been a dangerous decision. If some of them were enemy agents sent in to strike from the inside… well, they could have caused considerable damage before they’d been gunned down. The UN had lost bases that way; the senior officers hadn’t kept a close eye on who’d gone in and out, allowing the enemy a chance to slip infiltrators in and set bombs, or poison the drinking water. Even if they weren’t enemy agents, they’d barely been checked out on their weapons. The results could be disastrous. “If the enemy breaks in, they’ll be ready.”

“One would hope,” I agreed. The guards insisted on checking our identity; they’d moved into the sheltered interior, but there was no way in without passing them. I passed over my ID card without comment and pressed my thumb against the scanner when they asked for confirmation. Peter and Russell followed suit. “Come on.”

The interior of the command bunker, I was relieved to see, wasn’t full of panic and confusion. Robert, who’d been in command until I arrived, looked relieved to see me, even though he seemed to have been doing fine. The enemy had been doing fine as well; the number of red pinpricks on the display, each one marking an enemy attack against our forces, seemed to have multiplied into the hundreds. I silently cursed the UN for leaving so much war material and ammunition lying about, before focusing on the reports coming in from the main gate.

“I’m having B Company prepped to go out and chase the bastards away,” Robert said, obviously intending to take command himself as soon as I was fully briefed. “They’re pushing too close to us to drive them away without an infantry advance, but they’re obviously armed and well-prepared. They’ll pick off any tanks we send out without infantry support.”

I nodded. Infantrymen never believed it in the UN — where infantry and tanker units were kept well apart, for some stupid reason a bureaucrat had come up with years ago, but in the Legion, there was a great deal of crossing between different types of units — but tankers were often scared to death of infantry. It went both ways, of course; from the infantryman’s perspective, the tank was an invincible rumbling fortress, but the drivers knew that they could barely see, that their sensors were unreliable, and that an enemy with an antitank weapon or a Molotov Cocktail could ruin their day. The Landshark was a formidable weapon, but a lucky insurgent with a bottle of petrol could take one out, if they were lucky.

“See to it,” I agreed. The display showed that the enemy was attacking from all sides, but they only seemed to be making a real effort at the main gate. That wasn’t too surprising. The remainder of the base would be far harder to break into even with a preliminary bombardment. We hadn’t had to worry about moving in and out ourselves, so we’d rigged up even more unpleasant surprises for anyone stupid enough to try to break in. The barbed wire alone had caught a handful of Communists during the Communist Insurrection.

Robert hurried out as I turned my attention to reports from the other garrisons. We’d established a network of small patrol bases and garrisons intended to harass enemy fighters and prevent them from slipping close to the cities, and all of them had come under attack. The enemy had clearly been using the lull to lay their plans carefully, but it didn’t look as if most of the garrisons were going to be overrun. They didn’t have counter-mortar units shooting down incoming mortars, but they did have mortars of their own, armed with counter-battery radar. The main commanders of those bases were locals — I couldn’t spare many men from the Legion to command them, even if it wouldn’t have bred resentment — but they seemed to be doing fine. Only a handful had been caught so badly by surprise that it looked as if they were going to fall.

“Show me the feed from the UAV,” I ordered, cursing — not for the first time, naturally — my own position. I could issue orders and know that they would be obeyed, but I couldn’t actually do anything for myself. My Captains and Sergeants and even Privates would be hitting back at the enemy, but my duty would keep me well away from the front lines — unless the enemy brought them to my position. Even so, I wasn’t meant to be fighting, but staying alive to ensure continuity of command. I wanted to be out there, fighting back, yet what choice did I have? “I want to know what’s happening in the countryside.”

The UAV was skimming rapidly towards Fort Galloway, but even it was held back by demands from other sides, requesting real-time footage of what was going on around them. The ground seemed to be seething with enemy soldiers surrounding the various garrisons and pinning them down, while the handful of patrols that had been caught in the open seemed to be trapped — or being forced to surrender. I hoped that the enemy would treat their prisoners well — we hadn’t mistreated our own prisoners, but insurgents played by different rules and their media groupies whined when we played by their rules — but I remembered what the Freedom League had done to Muna and I and scowled. If they mistreated their prisoners, I would make them pay.

“Lieutenant Barrowman is reporting that his men are out of ammunition and are firmly trapped,” a dispatcher reported, breaking through my thoughts. “He’s decided to surrender and ask for terms.”

“Understood,” I said, looking through the eyes of the UAV as the soldiers offered surrender. Wary farmers surrounded them, cuffed them, and took them away on farm vehicles. I keyed a command into my console, warning the UAV to watch the farm vehicles and see where they ended up, but I knew it wasn’t going to be useful. We didn’t have enough UAVs to task one of them to observe the prisoners and their treatment full-time. It would have been different with a full satellite system and a set of intelligence analysts to maintain it, but Svergie wasn’t a wealthy world. It couldn’t have afforded such a system even if it could have built it. “Enter a note in the log; Lieutenant Barrowman had no choice and will not suffer any punishment for it, once he returns to us.”

“Yes, sir,” the dispatcher said. Under the UN, every POW had to be accounted for with so much paperwork that some POWs were simply reported as dead, just to keep the paperwork down to a handful of forests. A returning POW would be interrogated at length by the Security Directorate and the Political Officers, just to ensure that he or she hadn’t been contaminated by the exposure to the enemy. Some POWs on Heinlein had made the mistake of telling their interrogators — after they were returned — how much better Heinlein was to Earth and had never been seen again. We could afford to be a great deal more civilised than the UN.

My earpiece buzzed. “Sir, this is Robert,” Robert’s voice said. “We are preparing to engage the enemy now.”

“Understood,” I said. “Good luck.”

The sound of mortars grew louder as we fired our own shells back at the enemy positions, forcing them to duck and cover, while B Company advanced out of the rear gate. The enemy hadn’t pressed an assault against that section — I wasn’t sure why, unless they only had limited manpower — and it was an oversight that cost them dearly. Backed up by a pair of tanks and several APCs, the men of B Company cleared the enemy away from that section and started to circle around the spaceport, hunting for the site of the enemy mortar teams. Even for highly-trained infantry, covering such ground took time, allowing the enemy a chance to redeploy their own forces to meet them. It was a chance that we weren’t going to allow them to use.

Another furious salvo of mortar fire pinned down the enemy as the tanks advanced from the main gate. They didn’t have to worry about the prospect of any of our people among the enemy and so they laid down massive waves of fire into anything that might have been a threat. An enemy antitank team, either very brave or very stupid, got off an antitank rocket and destroyed one of my tanks before being scythed down by its fellows. With B Company attacking from the flanks and the tanks advancing — now with infantry support themselves from C Company and local reserves — the enemy started to fall back. It was an attempt to gain time to counter our move, but again, we weren’t going to give them that time.

I keyed my earpiece quickly. “Launch the first helicopters,” I ordered, sharply. “The enemy is in disarray.”

The display updated as the first helicopter lumbered into the air, orbiting out over the spaceport and heading towards the enemy positions. The gamble seemed to have paid off; the enemy hadn’t had a chance to set up any antiaircraft weapons again to take pot shots at the helicopters, at least before the helicopters opened fire themselves. The enemy, deprived of anywhere to hide, melted away under the helicopters’ ruthless fire and died in droves. A handful threw their hands up in surrender, casting their weapons on the ground, but the vast majority tried to run. There was nowhere to hide from the helicopters, or the advancing counterattack.

“Take prisoners,” I ordered, when Robert contacted me to ask if we should bother. We needed to know what the prisoners knew, although the odds were that it wouldn’t be very much. I wouldn’t have sent people who knew everything into a position where they could be captured and interrogated by the enemy. I’d been captured myself, of course, but I hadn’t been going somewhere where I might expect to be captured. “Get them secured, then get them back to the guardhouse. I want the interrogators to pull out all the stops.”

Under the watchful eye of the helicopters, the handful of prisoners were rounded up, apart from a pair of men who were too badly wounded to last for very long. Robert’s men did the only thing they could and gave them a mercy killing, before setting out to survey the surrounding territory and looking for more enemy forces. I wouldn’t have put it past the enemy — and the intercepted transmissions suggested that I was right — to have an observer or two watching from a safe distance, just to report on what had happened to the enemy leadership. They would know that their assault on the spaceport had failed; indeed, that it hadn’t even come close to succeeding. Why…?

Because they wanted to pin us down, I realised, and swore under my breath. “Get me the feed from the UAV,” I snapped. I’d turned it away from watching what was happening in the north so that I could watch Robert’s men as they destroyed the enemy fighters. “Show me Fort Galloway.”

The UAV computer suggested something else I should look at, something that even the UN-issue program operating the UAV thought was important. I looked at it and swore. An entire army was advancing down from the mountains, towards New Copenhagen — and Fort Galloway. An entire modern armoured force. It looked to be about a Regiment in size.

“Shit,” I said, mildly. “Contact the garrisons and tell them to start deploying according to Alpha-Seven. We may have a bit of a serious fight on our hands.”